A railway system has a train operation schedule which is operated every day and is fixed for a certain period of time, yet needs to undergo an operation of changing the operation schedule when some operation failures such as failure of a device or occurrence of an accidence occur even in this certain period of time. Further, in recent years, issuance of a power-use-regulation order and a power-saving request from power electric companies require that railway operators adequately create special schedules of the reduced number of operating trains to adequately reduce a power consumption amount. In view of the above situation, various techniques of adequately and easily changing operation schedules are being proposed.
For example, Patent Document 1 proposes a technique of automatically creating operation schedules by curtailing the number of trains from an original operation schedule when curtail parameters are specified.
Further, generally speaking, when an operation schedule is changed, a tight operation state where multiple trains run in narrow sections in a short time appears in a time zone in which an operation is resumed and then returns to a normal operation schedule, and a power consumption amount rapidly increases. Hence, for example, Patent Document 2 proposes a technique of estimating a future power consumption amount and automatically changing an operation schedule such that the power consumption amount does not exceed an upper limit value of the power consumption amount set in advance.
Further, as one method of reducing the power consumption amount, a recent railway system actively adopts a power regeneration technique of converting running energy into electrical energy when a running train stops and recovering the energy. Also, for example, Patent Document 3 proposes a technique of calculating a power consumption amount and a regenerated power amount per predetermined section, and creating an operation schedule for effectively utilizing regenerated power.